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State legislation to halt expansion of natural gas infrastructure in Maine as soon as next year has been cut back into a package of studies that contemplate the role of gas in the state’s energy future.
Environmental advocates hope these studies will prove that continued reliance on gas is the wrong choice for public health, ratepayer pocketbooks and Maine’s climate goals, while the state’s gas utilities see the new version of the bill as a chance to explore roles for alternative fuels like hydrogen and biogas.
“The gas utilities are going to make a very strong case that they’re more part of the solution to climate change than part of the problem — [there is] a lot of skepticism about that,” said Bill Harwood, Maine’s Public Advocate for residential utility customers. “If they can’t make the case, then we will look at how we transition away from natural gas and toward wind, solar and electricity.”
Harwood wrote the initial proposal, which would have barred utilities from including the cost of new gas service lines and mains in residential and commercial customers’ rates starting in 2025 and would have told state regulators not to approve any expanded gas service.
This plan, which also included studies about the health effects of gas appliances and methane leaks and the economics of a climate-driven transition off it, quickly proved “very controversial,” Harwood said.
It drew opposition from the gas utilities, building trades, industrial sector and the Maine Governor’s Energy Office, which helps oversee the state’s climate plan.
Those stakeholders worked with environmental groups and Harwood’s office to craft a compromise amendment eliminating the proposed ban on gas expansions, which narrowly passed in a legislative committee last week.
The amendment proposes a state Public Utilities Commission inquiry on ways to plan and oversee utilities’ future gas investments in Maine; a Governor’s Energy Office study on the economic impacts of Maine’s existing gas service and its potential role in “supporting the transition to a low carbon future”; and a commission to study ways to ensure a just energy transition for Maine workers.
Jack Shapiro, the climate and clean energy director with the Natural Resources Council of Maine, which supported the original bill and worked on the amendment, said these studies should give legislators the evidence they need to start a real transition from gas and the industry’s favored alternative fuels.
“Our 2030 goals are six years away, and we’re seeing the impacts of climate change pretty starkly this winter,” Shapiro said. “We can’t go around and say, well, maybe this technology will evolve over time … we need to make sure we’re not chasing shadows here.”
The new version of the bill now heads to the full Democratically-controlled legislature for a vote and then potential signature by Maine Gov. Janet Mills, also a Democrat.
The Mills administration has been nationally lauded for pushing Maine residents to switch from heating oil to electric heat pumps, among other clean energy goals.
The Governor’s Energy Office declined to answer questions for this story about how the amended gas bill and their opposition to the original version align with state climate policy.
Maine’s targets include using 100% renewable electricity by 2040 and cutting greenhouse gas emissions 45% from 1990 levels by 2030 and 80% by 2050. Maine reached 51% renewable electricity in 2023 and was 25% below 1990 emissions as of 2019.
The Governor’s Energy Office is tasked with studying pathways to the renewable energy goal and is due to recommend one this year. The studies proposed in the amended gas bill would dig into the economics of where gas and pipelines may fit in.
Right now, Maine uses less gas than almost any other state, especially in the residential sector, where supply is concentrated mostly in the far southern part of the state. Federal data shows gas serves about 8% of Maine’s home heating needs, for example, while heating oil supplies 56%.
But Maine’s four gas utilities are growing. Analysis by Harwood’s office found they’ve installed more than 100 miles of new pipe, an 8% increase, and added more than 6,000 new customers, a 12% increase, since 2019.
“We don’t want the gas utilities to continue to expand, business as usual, and then turn around and present the bill to those ratepayers who are taking natural gas once the dust settles,” Harwood said. “What we were trying to do in the original (bill) was stop expansion, but not interfere right now with their (the utilities’) continued ability to deliver gas to those customers who have already made the investment.”
To state Rep. Sophie Warren (D-Scarborough), who sits on the legislature’s energy committee, the amendment marks a pragmatic but disheartening approach to getting anything on this topic passed.
“I feel in some ways ashamed to be voting for something that is so far from what could have been good and useful and necessary,” Warren said to fellow legislators on the committee before voting in favor of the amendment March 7.
Warren, who is in her second term and graduated from college in 2019, said in a later interview that she and others of her generation want to see more urgency and less incrementalism from Maine politicians on issues like this. She raised concerns about how much influence the gas industry had on the amendment, which she sees as in direct conflict with the need to go completely fossil-free to fight climate change.
“I really fear that we could be getting away from what science demands, what justice demands,” she said. “We can’t be, in this year of 2024, saying that natural gas is a partner in that. We have to understand that our goal must be far more ambitious.”
Alec O’Meara, the director of external affairs for Unitil, one of Maine’s gas providers, said the state’s outsized reliance on fuels like heating oil means lower-carbon gas can still aid in decarbonization.
“We have opportunities to help reduce (emissions) today,” he said, “and we see opportunities to use gas infrastructure to help deliver renewable energy in the future as well.”
The governor’s office study in the new version of the bill would be required to be consistent with state climate policy while considering ways to do that, including with green hydrogen (made from water using renewable energy), biogas from farms (sometimes called “renewable natural gas”), and district-scale geothermal electricity.
“We see our infrastructure really as a pipeline infrastructure,” said Lizzy Reinholt, a senior vice president with Summit Utilities, another of Maine’s gas providers. “Much like we focus on creating policy and regulatory frameworks to reduce the emissions intensity of the electrons running in the wires above us, we think it’s just as incumbent on the state to focus on how we reduce the emissions intensity of the molecules in the pipes.”
It’s not clear yet whether hydrogen or biogas would be considered “renewable” for Maine’s climate goals. But environmental groups have cast doubt on these fuels’ value as part of the state’s energy transition.
“We already know that alternative fuels, like hydrogen and renewable natural gas, are not economic, efficient or scalable climate solutions for heating,” said Emily Green, a senior attorney for the Conservation Law Foundation in Maine, another nonprofit that backed the original bill and helped with the amendment. “We are confident that the state’s (proposed) reports will reach that conclusion.”
A 2019 study from the American Gas Foundation found that Maine could produce about 19.6 trillion Btu of biogas per year if it maxed out production from farms, landfills and more. That would replace about a third of Maine’s already low yearly natural gas consumption, according to federal data.
Summit spent $20 million on an anaerobic digester in Clinton, Maine, that turns cow manure from dairy farms into biogas — enough to supply nearly half of the company’s residential load in Maine.
That customer base is a very small part of a small utility sector in the state. Compared to Unitil’s 27,000 residential customers, Summit has fewer than 5,000 in Maine — a third of what the company has built its system for, according to Harwood, who has sparred with Summit over its rates and growth in recent years.
Reinholt argued that Harwood’s original bill would have prematurely limited exploration of these and other approaches as potential “levers that we can pull” in Maine’s climate efforts.
Still, Harwood and others said the proposed studies in the amendment will take up precious time on the way to Maine’s climate goals and to scientists’ predicted future harms if emissions don’t decline sharply.
“Time is our enemy, and we’d all like to see these … decisions made sooner rather than later,” Harwood said. “But there’s only so much resources available in state government. This is the best we can get.”
A new North Carolina climate plan outlines actions that would help curb greenhouse gas pollution by nearly two-thirds by 2030 — surpassing a state goal and meeting scientists’ recommendations for how to avoid the worst impacts of global warming.
The state is already on pace to cut emissions just over 40% compared to 2005 levels. But the steps outlined in the new blueprint, crafted as part of the federal Inflation Reduction Act, would slash heat-trapping pollution even further.
If sustained over the ensuing decades, the measures would also bring the state closer to zeroing out its climate footprint by midcentury, though officials stress that doing so would require “significant will, funding, and effort.”
Finalized earlier this month after weeks of webinars, community meetings, and other forms of public feedback, the Priority Action Climate Plan covers six areas of the state’s economy: transportation, electricity, buildings, industry, waste, and lands. The action items are “implementation ready,” officials say, and not dependent on new state laws or policies.
By far, the biggest opportunity for curbing pollution is in the building sector. Ramping up support for low-income weatherization assistance, energy efficiency upgrades in government buildings, and other measures to reduce energy usage per square foot could account for 60% of pollution reductions anticipated by 2030.
“The buildings sector is one with a lot of low-hanging fruit that hasn’t been widely addressed to date,” said Sara Edwards, a spokesperson with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, which took the lead in crafting the action plan.
Edwards noted the state’s 2009-era residential building code, which is frozen in place until 2031 thanks to a law passed last year. “Even new housing stock coming online is not as energy efficient as it could be,” she said.
Many older commercial and public buildings lack up-to-date lighting and energy management systems, she added. “State agency buildings alone have identified over $200 million of energy saving projects that are waiting for funding to implement,” she said.
“The same types of projects could be implemented at public universities and community colleges, as well as schools and local government buildings, resulting in significant ongoing savings to [state] taxpayers,” said Edwards.
Phasing out direct combustion of fossil fuels in buildings, such as from gas furnaces, could achieve another 36 million metric tons of emissions, almost a quarter of the cuts.
Recommendations in the other five sectors combined could result in a fifth of the reductions, or a total of 29 million metric tons of carbon dioxide or the equivalent.
In the transportation sector, today the state’s largest source of greenhouse gasses, priority steps include facilitating transportation choices other than cars and increased deployment of electric vehicles and charging infrastructure.
To curb emissions from electric utilities, the plan focuses on boosting solar panels on homes, local government properties, and other small institutions, complementing a state law requiring Duke to ramp up larger-scale renewable energy investments.
The blueprint also outlines programs to increase industrial efficiency, better capture methane gas from landfills, and restore and protect peatlands and forests, vital for their ability to capture and store carbon.
North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality joined 44 other states in submitting its priority climate action plan, according to an announcement this week from the Environmental Protection Agency.
Charlotte, the Triangle, and the Eastern Band of Cherokees were among nearly 200 metropolitan regions and tribes around the country who submitted their own plans, as well.
The documents set the stage for the next phase of the federal Climate Pollution Reduction Grant program. With the blueprints as their guide, tribes, states, and large metropolitan regions will now work to apply for $4.6 billion in competitive grants for implementation.
As the Biden administration races to get Inflation Reduction Act funds out the door this year, the deadline for those proposals is April 1.
Meanwhile, the Department will take comments on the priority plan until June 3, which it says will inform yet another strategy document required under the Inflation Reduction Act: a comprehensive climate action plan, due in June 2025.
“Throughout this process,” Edwards said, “we’ve done public outreach and stakeholder engagement. That’s going to continue throughout. It’s not just like we’re going to drop this document and not take public comment.”
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: A new Biden administration plan aims to build electric semi-truck chargers along high-traffic sections of highway across the country, largely in the Northeast, on the West Coast, and in Texas. (The Hill)
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POLITICS: President Biden’s proposed 2025 federal budget includes more funding for community energy programs, transmission planning and permitting, and offshore wind siting and construction, among other clean energy programs. (Utility Dive)
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FINANCE: The U.S. EPA prepares to announce $20 billion for nonprofits to expand lending for climate and clean energy projects in low-income communities. (Politico)
UTILITIES: Over 1,000 victims of last year’s deadly Maui wildfires plan to sue Hawaiian Electric and other entities, alleging the utility’s equipment sparked the blaze. (Hawaii News Now)
MATERIALS: The closure of three U.S. aluminum manufacturing plants could threaten the transition to clean energy and electrification, experts say. (E&E News)
ELECTRIFICATION: Colorado restaurants say switching from natural gas to electric induction stoves and ovens has improved their food quality and the kitchen atmosphere. (Rocky Mountain PBS)
CARBON CAPTURE: A North Dakota electric cooperative is betting a $2 billion carbon capture project will allow a coal-fired power plant to comply with Minnesota law, but critics say the plan is absurdly complicated and expensive compared to alternatives. (MPR News)
OIL & GAS:
CLIMATE: Colorado climate advocates debate whether slashing fossil fuel demand, restricting oil and gas supplies or a combination of the two would be most effective in cutting greenhouse gas emissions. (Colorado Newsline)
ALSO: Washington state lawmakers allocate $30 million to provide fuel surcharge rebates to farmers and truckers not exempted from the state’s carbon cap-and-invest program. (Washington State Standards)
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CLEAN ENERGY: The Biden administration awards Mountain West tribal nations about $26 million to bring electricity to off-grid homes and fund clean energy systems. (KUNR)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: A southern California port unveils the nation’s first all-electric tug boat and expects to begin operations next month. (San Diego Union-Tribune)
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TRANSITION: A Navajo Nation nonprofit looks to convert a defunct rail line connecting a decommissioned coal mine and power plant in northern Arizona into a running and cycling trail. (Navajo-Hopi Observer)
ELECTRIFICATION: Colorado restaurants say switching from natural gas to electric induction stoves and ovens has improved their food quality and the kitchen atmosphere. (Rocky Mountain PBS)
COMMENTARY: A Montana advocate urges the federal government to stop leasing land to oil and gas companies, saying drilling will harm the state’s growing outdoor recreation economy. (Montana Standard)
HYDROGEN: Pennsylvania’s governor says at a divisive public meeting that the state is “all in when it comes to the hydrogen hubs,” but environmentalists say the hard-to-reach location of the meeting shows a lack of interest in community engagement. (WHYY)
FOSSIL FUELS:
SOLAR: In New York, Niagara County’s environmental coordinator says the county’s solar panel recycling law is improving end-of-life panel management, but not all solar projects are complying. (Union-Sun & Journal)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
GRID: New Jersey lawmakers mull the potential impact of two bills, which would codify a gubernatorial order to have all electricity sales involve clean energy by 2035 and spend $300 million on grid upgrades. (RTO Insider, subscription)
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STORMS: Massachusetts plans to appeal federal emergency management officials’ decision to not issue a major disaster declaration over the severe flooding that swept through the state in September. (Associated Press)
CLIMATE: The president of the New York Farm Bureau says his farmers support climate action but worry the push for electrification comes before electric farm equipment can handle the long hours required. (Spectrum News 1)
TRANSIT: Two Somerville, Massachusetts, council members plan to introduce a resolution to remove “unnecessary” parking spaces from new developments to help meet climate goals. (Boston Herald)
GRID: An analysis finds Texas has experienced 263 power outages since 2019, the most of any state in the country, indicating its power grid is struggling under demand and extreme weather. (Houston Chronicle)
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STORAGE: Texas residents are worried about a developer’s plans to build a battery storage facility near a neighborhood and elementary school. (KTRK)
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UTILITIES: Austin, Texas’ municipal utility pauses the process of reworking its resource, generation and climate plan while the mayor pushes to divest from a coal-fired power plant and environmentalists call for more renewables. (Austin Monitor)
GEOTHERMAL: A student team from the University of Oklahoma wins a competition for its design of geothermal wells to heat a 40,000-square-foot greenhouse operated by the Osage Nation. (KWTV/KSBI)
MINING: A Virginia company moves to reopen critical minerals mining and production facilities in the state, after having previously discontinued operations there in 2015. (Virginia Mercury)
COMMENTARY:
CARBON CAPTURE: A North Dakota electric cooperative is betting a $2 billion carbon capture project will allow a coal-fired power plant to comply with Minnesota’s law requiring carbon-free electricity by 2040, but critics say the plan is absurdly complicated and expensive compared to alternatives. (MPR News)
CLEAN ENERGY:
MATERIALS: The closure of three U.S. aluminum manufacturing plants, including one in Missouri, could threaten the transition to clean energy and electrification, experts say. (E&E News)
SOLAR: South Dakota’s largest solar project, a 128 MW installation near Rapid City, is scheduled to come online ahead of schedule. (South Dakota Searchlight)
CLIMATE: Nebraska’s 76-page climate action plan includes incentives for a host of energy efficiency, solar and regenerative agriculture projects. (Nebraska Examiner)
EMISSIONS: A new report calls on Chicago to set limits on emissions from certain commercial buildings that could grow stricter over time. (Chicago Tribune)
PIPELINES: Indigenous author and advocate Winona LaDuke says both North Dakota and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are to blame for the policing costs and handling of Dakota Access pipeline protests in late 2016. (North Dakota Monitor)
BIOENERGY: An Irish company plans to invest $400 million at a Wisconsin ethanol plant to include a new large plant-based renewable natural gas production facility. (Journal Sentinel)
NUCLEAR: South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem signs a bill into law that updates legal language and allows the state to potentially enter into agreements for nuclear power projects. (SDPB)
COAL:
UTILITIES: WEC Energy Group taps Indiana utility NIPSCO’s president and COO to lead We Energies and Wisconsin Public Service Corp. (Journal Sentinel)
This story was originally published by Canary Media.
One of California’s marquee programs for cleaning up transportation emissions is at a crossroads. Decisions made in the next few months could set the decade-and-a-half-old Low Carbon Fuel Standard on one of two very different paths.
One path, favored by fossil fuel and renewable natural gas interests, would lock in a market scheme that currently extracts billions of dollars per year from Californians at the pump and subsidizes crop-based and cow-manure-derived biofuels.
That would be a disaster, according to environmental advocates, who point to a growing body of scientific evidence showing that this approach, if extended until 2045 as proposed, would cause these biofuels to grow at a scale that would harm the climate and the environment.
The other path, proposed by environmental groups, transportation-decarbonization analysts and climate and energy researchers, would limit the scope of unsustainable biofuels in the program, and instead reorient it to support what experts agree should be California’s primary clean transportation pathway: electric vehicles.
To date, roughly 80 percent of LCFS funding has gone to combustion biofuels rather than electric vehicles. That’s simply incompatible with the state’s EV ambitions and needs, said Adrian Martinez, deputy managing attorney of nonprofit advocacy group Earthjustice — and the imperative to reduce emissions from transportation, which account for nearly 40 percent of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions.
“We’ve got to eliminate our reliance on combustion,” he said, but “the program as designed will continue to provide lucrative incentives for combustible fuels well into the future.”
The regulator in charge of the LCFS program — and this high-stakes decision — is the California Air Resources Board. CARB’s board, which comprises 14 voting members, 12 appointed by the governor and two by the state legislature, holds a host of responsibilities around California’s energy transition. Those include shaping the state’s nation-leading EV policy, as well as determining its broad plans for achieving long-term greenhouse-gas reduction goals.
Critics say the LCFS program’s increasing support for biofuels is in direct contrast to both the EV targets and the climate goals also overseen by CARB — and that the program has been captured by deep-pocketed industries trying to greenwash the continued use of combustion fuels.
CARB has a chance to reform the program with an upcoming vote, initially set for this month, but now postponed to an undetermined future date. But its pathway to fixing the problems that plague LCFS is murky and messy at best.
Right now, the staff managing the LCFS program hasn’t given CARB board members an opportunity to pick a climate- and EV-friendly alternative. Instead, a December staff proposal provides only one option for the board to vote on later this year: a set of policies that Earthjustice forecasts would direct $27 billion over the coming decade toward biofuels and worsen effects on the climate, the environment and the prices that Californians pay at the pump.
CARB does have another option, however — an alternative proposal laid out by CARB’s Environmental Justice Advisory Committee, created to advise the board on environmental-justice issues.
That proposal would cap the fast-growing share of crop-based renewable diesel flooding the state. It would also end the unusual structure that now allows biogas produced by dairy farm manure to offset a much higher amount of carbon emissions than any other source of alternative fuels.
And, importantly, it would make the core of the program — its carbon-offset marketplace — function in a much healthier way, proponents say. A torrent of cheap, polluting renewable diesel and dairy farm biogas credits have dragged down the price that LCFS credits can fetch for avoiding emissions, diluting the incentive to deploy new climate technologies and sapping what could be a key funding source for EV infrastructure in the state.
“The stakes are very, very high,” Martinez said. “That’s why you see so much attention focused on this — and a very broad and diverse coalition that is pushing for more systemic change to the program, versus more modest tweaks that will really just keep this market owned and dominated by fossil fuel interests.”
California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard was born out of AB 32, the 2006 law that created the state’s carbon cap-and-trade market. Much like carbon markets, LCFS is meant to make companies pay for their carbon emissions by buying credits from technologies that reduce carbon emissions.
The program requires all fossil fuels refined and sold in California to meet increasingly stringent carbon-intensity targets. In practice, fossil fuel producers have to buy a bunch of LCFS credits from low-carbon transit sources operating in the state in order to comply. The goal is to create a system that taxes planet-warming fossil fuels to fund cleaner transportation alternatives.
But the LCFS has strayed from its initial focus on vehicle electrification and “advanced” non-crop-based biofuels to become “a swag bag for venture capitalists, big oil, big agriculture, and big gas, increasingly coming at the expense of low- and moderate-income Californians.” That’s how Jim Duffy, a 13-year veteran of the agency who served as branch chief of the LCFS program from 2019 to 2020 and retired in 2022, described the evolution of the program in comments filed with CARB.
Under the LCFS regulation adopted in 2009, dairy-manure-to-biogas projects did not receive special treatment compared to other sources of methane such as landfills and sewage treatment plants, Duffy wrote. Similarly, diesel fuels made from crops like soybeans were considered “only marginally better than fossil diesel.”
But in the years since, “the LCFS was revised to provide additional and unnecessary support to landfills and first-generation crop-based biofuels” and “to mitigate the methane problem created by the dairy industry itself,” Duffy wrote — despite the fact that evidence increasingly suggests that both sources harm the planet far more than they benefit it.
The result has been an increasing share of LCFS credits being supplied by renewable diesel and dairy-generated biogas.
CARB has justified these shifts with analysis indicating they will yield net positive climate impacts.
“The proposed amendments now under consideration will directly increase the program benefits in the most burdened communities, by reducing the carbon across the supply chain for fuels sold in California, as well as improving public health for fuels sold in California,” CARB spokesperson Dave Clegern said in an email to Canary Media. He cited data from CARB staff’s analysis of its proposal indicating that, by 2045, its plan will reduce nitrogen oxide emissions by 25,586 tons, cut greenhouse gas emissions by 560 million metric tons and yield public-health cost savings of nearly $5 billion.
But critics say the agency is failing to account for the full scope of climate harms that will be caused by its continued emphasis on biofuels.
They warn that the sheer scale of California’s program — totaling some $4 billion per year — is driving investment in the wrong transportation alternatives. The consequences are dire, they say — not just within the state, but across the country and around the world.
Take renewable diesel, a fuel made from fats and oils processed to be identical to fossil diesel fuel. The U.S. increased production of the fuel by 400% between 2019 and 2022, and it is set to double it again this year, according to Jeremy Martin, senior scientist and director of fuels policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Unlike ethanol and biodiesel, which can only partially replace gasoline and diesel, renewable diesel has “no limit on how much can be blended,” Martin said. It could theoretically completely replace diesel fuel for trucks, buses and other vehicles. And California’s LCFS offers credits on top of the federal incentives the fuel receives, making the state the primary target of renewable diesel producers across the country.
As a result, the share of renewable diesel as a percentage of total diesel fuel use has skyrocketed in California compared to the rest of the U.S., as the chart below shows.
In a September meeting, Steven Cliff, CARB’s executive officer, highlighted a milestone for the LCFS program: As of mid-2023, California had “more than half of our diesel demand being met by non-petroleum-based diesel alternatives. This is a direct result of the LCFS program, and it’s bringing real climate and air-quality benefits to the state.”
In Martin’s view, that milestone is not a win, but a warning. It indicates that renewable diesel is “flooding the LCFS, drowning the policy — and it doesn’t make sense” on climate or environmental terms.
Once the demand for renewable diesel outgrows the supply of waste oils and other non-crop feedstocks that can be used to make the fuel in genuinely climate-friendly ways, it becomes highly likely that it will cause more greenhouse gas emissions than it will displace. Critics like Martin argue that demand has now reached this point, though it’s a contested question.
This additional demand for crop oils could mostly serve “to expand the cultivation of palm oil to replace the soybean and other oils made into fuel,” the Union of Concerned Scientists argued in comments to CARB. That, in turn, is likely to lead to more rapid deforestation in nations that produce large amounts of these crops, such as Brazil and Indonesia — an outcome that would cause far greater climate harms than whatever emissions reductions result from replacing fossil diesel.
To stop this, the Union of Concerned Scientists and other groups want CARB to set a limit on how much renewable diesel can receive LCFS credits. CARB staff’s proposal declines to set such a cap, citing renewable diesel’s climate and health benefits.
But CARB’s methodology is out of step with the latest science, according to multiple groups studying these issues. The Union of Concerned Scientists, for its part, says CARB’s analysis is “based on inaccurate claims of climate and air-quality benefits and associated health outcomes.”
In a recent comparison of five different models for evaluating the climate impacts of crop-based biofuels, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found that only CARB’s own model shows a positive carbon-reduction impact.
And while the agency has a proposal to limit deforestation harms by setting “sustainability guidelines” for crops being used for renewable diesel, it applies only to feedstocks grown in the U.S., Martin noted. That’s a problem: California is on pace to consume 10 percent of global soybean oil supplies for renewable diesel, meaning a significant amount of the crop oil produced for the program will be grown under conditions CARB cannot police, he said.
Given that reality, Martin said, “If California declines to act — if they say, ‘This is evidence of success; look how little fossil diesel we’re using’” by replacing it with renewable diesel, “then, in fact, California is giving its support to a fuel that we know is unsustainable at these volumes.”
CLEAN ENERGY: For every dollar the Inflation Reduction Act put toward clean energy incentives, policy analysts say the private sector has matched $5.47, totaling nearly $750 billion in the first year after the law passed. (Grist)
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BUILDINGS: A New York City public housing pilot project currently underway shows promise in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and making apartments more comfortable through window-mounted heat pumps. (Associated Press)
GRID: Connecticut regulators approve the first round of pilot projects in a new program aimed at testing innovative hardware and software to decarbonize the electric grid. (Energy News Network)
MINING: Tribal nation citizens urge a federal human rights commission to push back on a predicted uranium mining boom, saying Indigenous communities continue to suffer from Cold War-era extraction of the fuel. (Inside Climate News)
BIOFUELS: California advocates call on the state to overhaul its low-carbon fuel standard program to support and fund electric vehicles and charging infrastructure rather than biofuels. (Canary Media)
COMMENTARY: An ecologist suggests that solar projects designed to have synergy with agriculture and ecosystems can preserve farmland and natural environments as the U.S. builds out solar arrays. (The Conversation)
BIOFUELS: California advocates call on the state to overhaul its low-carbon fuel standard program to support and fund electric vehicles and charging infrastructure rather than biofuels. (Canary Media)
OIL & GAS: U.S. Coast Guard officials say an oil sheen spotted off southern California’s coast last week may have emanated from a natural seep on the ocean floor. (ABC News)
COAL:
SOLAR: New Mexico’s Supreme Court rejects investor-owned utilities’ bid to loosen the state’s community solar program’s rules. (Albuquerque Journal)
GRID: Federal regulators approve new rules allowing California’s grid operator to participate in an extended day-ahead power market once it goes live. (RTO Insider, subscription)
CLEAN ENERGY: A California power agency awards cities in the northern part of the state $11.5 million to help fund clean energy-related projects. (Daily Journal)
CLIMATE: The U.S. Energy Department awards five New Mexico startups over $6 million to research, develop and scale up climate technology. (news release)
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